This morning I woke up dreaming I was writing a very long tweet, one longer than Twitlonger permits, to a couple of the people I follow on Twitter. It was about hugs and a new town with an old church, the problems with delivering hugs by proxy, and my lack of familiarity with the broad spectrum of church-going etiquette. They say that you know you are becoming fluent in a language when you dream in it.

It’s like when I was in the Czech Republic, I dreamed that I had to take a chemistry test in Czech and I was sure I could do it if only they would translate the test into English for me.

Close, but no cigar.

I may have nightmares about Wilson trading Pavs away but I still feel like I do not have the words to speak hockey correctly. My ambient awareness of a hockey community on Twitter, while balancing the absence of hockey in my offline life, has not solved the problem. The reading of zillions of articles and the watching of games and the listening to radio broadcasts also have not brought me any closer to fluency. I think maybe I really do need to be immersed, like they do for foreign languages, actually be surrounded by people who only speak hockey, and that’s not going to happen. Not here anyway.

Google Translate does not do an English to hockey and back again translation, not that it would make any sense if it did.

Maybe if I locked myself in the living room for four days and replayed every game on my DVR continuously I would get it. I think I only saved games that I did not find demoralizing but I’m not sure.

Also, there’s this fellow writing for KK who is writing too much. It’s making me feel lazy or like I’m falling behind the class. What the hell can he find to cover at this time of year? It’s not right.

Also not right: me fretting about all these things. They are distractions that impair my ability to think clearly, or at all.

One of the reasons I wouldn’t take the bar exam on a computer was that computers give you the ability to go back and edit. I have found that this is catastrophic for me when I am under a time constraint. It’s like lifting the bandage up to see if the wound is healing. That allows bacteria to get in when they might have been kept out. It slow things down, and there’s nothing to see under that bandage anyway that you didn’t know was there. So don’t do it. Press ahead, no reverse gear.

So if I could write everything longhand I might be okay, but that doesn’t work if you have to type it in eventually. Transcription is rife with opportunity to edit, change, revise, dawdle. Dawdling hardly ever helps. So I’m going to stop.